ABSTRACT
In all the foregoing chapters, as well as in the quotations from the official and private records, in spite of the horrors presented, we are conscious at times of a faint but insistent suggestion of irony, if not of humour. A careless or indifferent attitude on the part of those concerned, like the aversion from suicide, may well have been bound up with the religious belief that the earthly pilgrimage was nothing but a short period of trial, an approach, as it were, to eternal life.
